recap.ltd.uk

A range of different insights into the digital world for our learners in schools, colleges, universities and at home - whether they are young or old.

This is our educational consultancy weblog, featuring a range of topics of interest to professional educators. New posts are added from time to time and are assigned to different categories (labels) such as mobiles, technology and protocols as well as educators, lecturers, professors, teachers and leadership.

We hope you find the following posts both informative and thought provoking!

Effective Mobile CommunicationDate: 02 January 2012

In educational circles, smart-phones and web-enabled mobiles are either viewed as an opportunity or a threat. Which ever side of the argument you take, the reality is that more and more children and young people have access to and use these devices on a regular basis.

There are good examples of effective practice in schools where the opportunity to enhance learning by utilising mobiles. Take, for example, an English lesson with Y10 students who had pre-recorded accounts about themselves on their mobiles and used these as a basis for summarising key points from the narrative.

Increasingly, schools are beginning to make use of text messaging to alert parents to absences and other events in schools. The biggest challenge facing schools is the extent to which they embrace not only web-enabled mobile access via their websites but also the ways in which social websites such as Facebook and Twitter are used to create an online presence of the school as an organisation.

Tweets via Twitter, for example, can alert a wide audience to key events in school and reach out not only to pupils, students and parents but also to the wider community. Of course, posts on Twitter and Facebook require a concise writing style to convey clear messages with brevity. Usefully, posts can include links to further articles, documents or information on websites.

That neatly brings us back to where we started. Are school websites geared to detect mobile access and present a mobile website alternative?

Over the last decade most schools have created a presence on the Internet via their own website. Increasingly, such websites act as a portal for primary pupils and secondary students to access learning resources and "learning platforms".

Not so long ago, schools were often advised to survey those on roll to ascertain the extent to which students have ready access to the Internet from home. However, with the rapid take off of smart-phones and web-enabled mobiles, such surveys are now much too narrow in scope and need to be updated.

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of children and young people with either a smart-phone or web-enabled mobile means school websites ought to cater for such users. Loading a standard website on a small screen is often slow and reading content is not easy. For digital natives this is certainly a big turn-off!

The likes of the BBC, Google, Facebook, Twitter and other organisations have led the way - incorporating auto-detection of mobiles to present and communicate key information on a format suitable for a small screen. Adapting school websites in this way would not only make the content more accessible anytime and anywhere but could also play key role in reaching out to parents and the community.

Within the UK, it is really disappointing that almost all local, national government and educational organisations such as Ofsted also implement a traditional website paradigm.

The time has come for government, educational organisations and schools to broaden their website strategy and embrace the reality of a world in which web-enabled mobiles are the norm for parents and children alike.